Our Town, Our College – Episode 1
Dr. Bob Hughlett

As we approach the 50th anniversary of the founding of Cerritos College I thought it would be fitting and fun to do a series of columns about that great institution through my eyes as a faculty member and administrator there for 33 years. Here is Episode 1.

It was a chilly, rainy January day in 1973 when I first set foot on the campus at Cerritos College as their newest, and, fresh off my 26th birthday, youngest full time faculty member. It was a school of over 20,000 at that point, serving over 6,000 veterans returned from Viet Nam and enrolled thanks to the G.I. bill. A small number of the vets were newly disabled through that experience and needing to begin or continue their education – as well as their life – with new approaches to functions as simple to most as getting out of bed in the morning to turning the pages of the book they were reading. Providing support for this small group of 23 young men made old before their time, as well as a smattering of 8 other people facing a variety of challenges presented to them by their body, was my new and challenging job.

So there I was, the same age or younger than almost all of the 31 students I was hired to “teach and lead” by Jack Randall, the Vice President of Instruction, with not a clue on how to proceed. Ron, the informal student leader who had ironically found himself in a wheelchair after an auto accident during the celebration marking his safe return from Viet Nam, came by during week one and asked me my first student question at the college “ how well do you play poker?” Well, it’s perhaps not the most orthodox approach but the fundamentals of what has grown to be an arm of the college serving over 1,200 students with physical, emotional or learning challenges each year first saw the light of day in a discussion that evening that ended with me $20 poorer (a princely sum in 1973) and enriched with the insight of my new “pupils”. And those fundamentals came in the form of three rules: “1. Stay out of our way and don’t let others throw up roadblocks”; 2. Make our playing field level, not tilted our way – or theirs - and; 3. Don’t you ever dare to feel sorry for us or tolerate those who do”.

The disabled vets went even further, building on the work of Wally Frost, a pioneering counselor in a wheelchair who had preceded all of us by several years and Steve Fasteau, the staff member I replaced, they scoured the campus for architectural barriers and suggested simple fixes that opened all of the doors on campus to them. When I went about trying to convince the college authorities that replacing steps with ramps, cutting down doorway thresholds to a height that wheelchairs could roll over them without making pretzels of the front casters and lowering towel dispensers was a good thing how did they react? In a word….magnificently.

An ingeniously creative carpenter, Jean Unruh, toured the campus with us and quickly designed effective solutions to everything from platforms for the back of the Lecture Hall (remember that round birthday cake of a building that used to sit right off Studebaker?) to curb cuts from the parking lots before the rest of the world ever considered such a thing. The college brass even arranged for the construction program on campus to do a few of the projects so here you had our Vietnam Vets in wheelchairs going over plans for a dozen curb cuts with the students who were going to make them – a memory that lives with me to this day.

I was also successful in getting both myself and others out of the way to the point that they established the Handicapped Students of Cerritos College, a club that joined the other fraternities, sororities and honor organizations recognized by the Associated Students of Cerritos College. In no time the HSCC was involved in building Homecoming floats (a Cerritos tradition that wonderfully continues to this day), blood drives and the famous Pat Boone’s All-Star celebrity basketball team fundraising game against the faculty and administration of Cerritos College with proceeds benefiting the club. It was at the basketball game that Jack Randall, who, by the way, was eventually to become president of Mount San Antonio College and Chancellor for the entire California Community College system took on Jim Brown (yes, footballer/actor/activist/big guy Jim Brown) for a rebound that ended with Mr. Brown owning the ball and Dr. Randall soon owning a new set of crutches for his wrenched knee. An injury he proudly recounts to this day.

If you have questions, comments, recollections or suggestions about this column or Cerritos College in general please email me at bob@BobHughlett.com .